At Cannes 2026 the AI debate changed shape. For years the argument was whether AI belonged on a film set at all; this year, many on the Croisette treated that as settled and moved to sharper questions - which AI, who is building it, and whose interests it serves.
A very old pattern
One argument kept resurfacing across the Marche du Film panels: the people who build the tools end up shaping the craft. It carries a historical rhyme. Early Hollywood was itself built by filmmakers escaping a technology monopoly - the Edison Trust, which controlled the motion-picture camera patents. Independents went west partly to own their own work. The claim now is that if artists do not help build the AI tools, the industry simply inherits systems designed around someone else's priorities.
Control, not just consent
This reframes the conversation past the usual fear of replacement. The question becomes authorship over the toolchain: whether the defaults, the training data and the constraints are set by people who make films or by people who make software. Those are different value systems, and the defaults tend to win quietly.
It is an argument worth taking seriously well beyond the major studios. A tool encodes a set of decisions about what matters and what can be ignored; the more of the craft that runs through tools, the more those buried decisions shape the result on screen. Cannes' real contribution this year was to move the discussion from "should we" to "who decides."
Source: panels at the Cannes 2026 Marche du Film, as recapped by Autodesk.